I’ve been thinking about trust a lot recently. Actually, I’ve been thinking of “Trust,” and how a book published 28 years ago can be relevant to our times today.
Francis Fukuyama’s “Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity” came out in 1995. It’s not his best-known work, but it may be his best. It is both wide-ranging and deeply researched.
He uses sociological data to investigate how people in several societies come to work together, especially in creating economic wealth. He defines low-trust societies as those where people are suspicious of strangers, preferring to work with family and those well known to them. He identifies Southern Italy, China and France as low-trust societies.
Low-trust countries tend to have smaller corporations, high levels of corruption and high levels of inequality.
This contrasts with Japan and Germany. In these societies, people expect to be treated impartially by corporate and government institutions, leading to the development of large-scale corporations, developed legal and regulatory systems, low levels of public corruption and innovativeness. The United States tends to fall closer to the high-trust end of the spectrum.
A quick anecdote illustrates the difference. A friend of mine, a British professor, was in Italy at a government office for some routine business. She dutifully waited in a slow-moving line, because that’s what Brits do. At the end of the day, right at closing time, she met a handsome young Italian policeman, who looked at her papers, and then at her. He said, “You are a professor, a scholar. You should not wait in line. Come back in the morning and ask for Benito.”
In northern Europe, people assume that everyone is treated the same way; the same is not true in Italy, and from stories I’ve heard, not in China either.
Fukuyama writes about the…
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